From Roman Imperium to Christian World Order

When Cicero described Rome as “an imperium over the world,” he articulated a vision of civilization united under Roman protection. This concept underwent a profound transformation with the rise of Christianity, where belonging became synonymous with Christian faith. Outsiders – those Aristotle and Greek thinkers taught Cicero to call “barbarians” for lacking civility – were now recast as “pagans.” By the High Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Emperor and Pope emerged as custodians of Christendom’s imperial legacy, inheriting what Italian jurist Andrea Alciato explicitly connected to Rome’s universal citizenship: “Just as all who lived under Rome became Roman citizens, so now all Christians are the Roman people.”

This ideological framework created a paradox during Europe’s overseas expansion. Just as Christendom’s universalist institutions began fracturing, European explorers encountered peoples who challenged their definitions of civilization. The Spanish conquest of Mexico exemplified this tension when Montezuma II, in a carefully staged deathbed ceremony, symbolically surrendered his empire to Charles V – a theatrical performance designed to echo biblical precedents of imperial succession. The Habsburg motto “Plus Ultra” (Further Beyond) surrounding the Pillars of Hercules on Charles’s coat of arms proclaimed this vision of universal monarchy.

The Fracturing of Christendom’s Claims

By the mid-16th century, papal and imperial authority could no longer sustain claims to global dominion. France’s Francis I famously challenged Charles V: “Show me Adam’s will that bequeaths you half the world!” England developed its own justification through Richard Hakluyt’s 1584 Discourse on Western Planting, which framed colonization as the Protestant monarch’s duty as “Defenders of the Faith.” The Virginia Enterprise’s triad of “religion, profit, and conquest” revealed how spiritual and material ambitions intertwined.

Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius delivered the most devastating critique in 1625, declaring attempts to base global authority on Christendom’s outdated foundations as stultum (foolish). European encounters with the sophisticated civilizations of the Ottomans, China, and India made universal claims rooted exclusively in Christian superiority increasingly untenable.

The Colonial Crucible: Justifying Dominion

Spain’s American empire sparked intense debates about legitimacy. Dominican theologian Francisco de Vitoria’s seminal lectures De Indis at Salamanca University posed the fundamental question: “By what right do the Spanish compel barbarians to obey them?” The Requerimiento document, read (often in Spanish to non-Spanish speakers) before conquest, absurdly offered indigenous peoples “free choice” between submission and devastating war. Bartolomé de las Casas, witnessing this charade, confessed he didn’t know “whether to laugh or weep.”

Other European powers developed distinct approaches:
– French colonists used Catholic blessing ceremonies to mark “voluntary” indigenous submission
– Portuguese maritime claims emphasized coastal markers and navigational charts
– Dutch and English colonists emphasized terra nullius arguments and “effective use” of land

As Elizabeth I told the Spanish ambassador in 1580: “Naming a river or cape…does not give them ownership.” Real control required physical occupation and military capacity.

Cultural Encounters and the Mirror of Difference

European settlers constructed identities through contrast with indigenous populations. Spanish historian López de Gómara justified conquest by contrasting European industry with perceived indigenous indolence: “We found not a single sugar mill in the Indies, yet through our labor created all that now exists.” Dutch naturalist Jakob Bontius protested his countrymen’s descriptions of Asians as “blind heathens” and “weak barbarians,” while Piet Hein acknowledged indigenous resentment of European arrogance: “Who can blame the wounded Indian for seeking revenge?”

These encounters forced Europeans to confront fundamental questions about human nature. José de Acosta’s experience of cold temperatures in the tropics led him to “laugh at Aristotle and his philosophy,” challenging classical authority with empirical observation. The flood of New World publications – from Cortés’s letters (published in five languages by 1525) to Ramusio’s Navigationi et Viaggi (1550) – created an insatiable European appetite for accounts of cultural difference.

The Legacy of Contested Belonging

The debates sparked by European expansion left enduring marks:
1. Racialized slavery emerged as an institution, justified through distorted interpretations of Noah’s curse on Ham
2. International law developed through figures like Grotius, who challenged Portuguese maritime monopolies
3. Utopian literature flourished, using imagined societies to critique European norms
4. Global toponymy preserves colonial naming practices from Jamestown to Batavia

Perhaps most significantly, Europe’s encounters with the wider world shattered medieval Christendom’s unified worldview. As Las Casas’s Brevísima relación circulated across Europe, translated into French (1570s), English and Dutch (1583), it fueled the “Black Legend” of Spanish cruelty while forcing Europeans to see themselves through others’ eyes. Montaigne’s essay On Cannibals encapsulated this reflexive moment: “I am not sorry we note the barbarous horror of [their] deeds, but that we should be so blind to our own.”

The imperial competitions of the 16th-17th centuries thus not only redrew global maps but reconfigured European identity itself, replacing medieval Christendom with new, often contradictory visions of civilization, belonging, and human difference that continue to resonate in our modern world.